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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-50855395
The Boeing company is going to have to cut short the uncrewed demonstration flight of its new astronaut capsule.
The Starliner launched successfully on its Atlas rocket from Florida, but then suffered technical problems that prevented it from taking the correct path to the International Space Station.
It appears the capsule burnt too much fuel as it operated its engines, leaving an insufficient supply to complete its mission.
Starliner will now come back to Earth. A landing is planned in the New Mexico desert in about 48 hours.
See also:
https://spacenews.com/starliner-suffers-off-nominal-orbital-insertion-after-launch/
https://spacenews.com/starliner-anomaly-to-prevent-iss-docking/
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Starliner Fails to Make Journey to ISS
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I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a
week sometimes to make it up.
-- Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad"
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday December 20 2019, @06:43PM (3 children)
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2019/12/starliner-mission-shortening-failure-successful-launch/ [nasaspaceflight.com]
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=43958.msg2027851#msg2027851 [nasaspaceflight.com]
Boeing privilege at work?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Friday December 20 2019, @08:00PM (2 children)
> Boeing privilege at work?
Nah. More like Boeing cash flow requirement.
- MAX production is stopped - we need another billion dollar mission
- Just inflate the price again
- Can't, we've been rumbled on doing that last time
- Well why not ****er something up on CFT so we have to run it again?
- Hmm, might work, would have to be software as the hardware is final, I think we have some guys spare from the MCAS vNext project, shall I put them on it?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 20 2019, @09:15PM (1 child)
Porks every time
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @01:28PM
Mmmm.... bacon. Crispy, no less.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday December 20 2019, @06:51PM (22 children)
Pondering . . . if failure for Boeing were to be nominal . . .
Then it wouldn't be necessary to say anything was off-nominal. You could say everything is nominal . . . unless Boeing does something that succeeds.
That said, I would like the US to have more than one way to put humans into space, alive, and bring them back. I'm just becoming less of a fan of "old space". Especially fueled by SLS.
For some odd reason all scientific instruments searching for intelligent life are pointed away from Earth.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday December 20 2019, @07:02PM (2 children)
Boeing is just using the old adage; Any landing you can walk away from is a good one.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday December 20 2019, @10:08PM
Yeah, but there's another old adage about eggs hatching and counting chickens; it hasn't landed yet... but for some reason I expect spectacular results.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday December 25 2019, @01:27AM
But no one is walking away from this landing. It's not crewed.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 20 2019, @07:11PM
Supernormal... supernominal.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday December 20 2019, @07:15PM
If?
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday December 20 2019, @07:17PM (16 children)
MCAS at work again?
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday December 21 2019, @02:40AM (15 children)
Evening news said it was a software problem. Apparently a timer was way off or something.
Maybe it's time to ban outsourcing software. Ask Boeing how much it's cost them so far.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday December 21 2019, @03:04AM
On another site I commented: It was a relativistic problem: the spaceship accelerated so fast that it altered the space-time continuum just enough and MCAS overcompensated.
Don't knock those outsourcers. For one, they make the stockholders happy. Well, for a short while. And secondly, they improve my career prospects. :)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 21 2019, @03:07AM
https://youtu.be/4QKr4-tNtPc?t=285 [youtu.be]
Scott Manley indicated that there might have been a problem connecting to TDRS satellites when Starliner was over the Middle East region, which could have triggered the software issue.
Boeing built 3rd-gen TDRS [mediaroom.com] lol
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @07:47AM (12 children)
A problem like this isn't just software - it's systemic. In rocketry there are a billion different things that can go wrong, and if even a single one of them does - then you have a mission failure, often with catastrophic consequences. So the name of the game is redundancy. You have sensors and then sensors for your sensors for your sensors. This is also why during a SpaceX launch literally any launch related employee can completely cancel a launch at any point completely unilaterally.
Burning more fuel than you need to 'survive' is something that should set off a million failsafes and triggered immediate manual intervention. That it didn't is something far more systemic than just some software bug that they're blaming. Boeing, as a company, seems to be basically just broken. They've gotten extremely good at getting the government to give them a practically unlimited amount of taxpayer money, but they pretty much suck at actually doing anything with it now a days. Interesting because they used to be a phenomenal company. I blame the Masters of Business Annihilation.
Saddest thing for me here is that Bridenstine actually seemed like a good guy. No clue what sort of influence Boeing has but he seems to have turned into yet another one of their lackeys.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 21 2019, @02:37PM (1 child)
Rocket Report: NASA chief hits back at Boeing, Falcon 9’s extended coast [arstechnica.com]
I think he's doing a balancing act. It's an impossible task for a NASA administrator to reel in Boeing's influence because Boeing has allies in Congress. Only a continuation of Boeing's fuckups and SpaceX's successes (particularly Starship) can put a stop to it.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @08:13PM
I'd really like to imagine you're right. And it does indeed make sense. I mean he is the head of NASA at the advent of what is probably the single most exciting time in history in terms of spaceflight.
Yet I've found that in real life 'walking a fine line', 'playing a balancing act', 'making progress one small step at a time', and so on are often rationalizations we use to justify what, in hindsight, was just simple corruption. He was playing PR for this incident trying to spin a complete mission failure, as a success. And, as the press conference happening right now is emphasizing, this mission was a much bigger failure than was initially let alone. The craft failed to deploy its comms equipment appropriately, it entered into the wrong guidance mode, the engines burned themselves beyond safe margins, all navigation stuff completely flopped, and more. Even better one of the reporters asked why there were no redundancies or fail-safes. Boeing's response 'We're not really sure. We're looking into that.' Point of this being that Bridenstine presumably knew this when he was trying to frame the mission as being 'a complete success, except for that whole docking thing'.
At some point somebody needs to simply start speaking honestly about Boeing. Because right now pretty much of all of D.C. is role-playing the emperor's new clothes with them, and it's getting increasingly absurd. I mean we could imagine that the goal is to make it absurd but to what end? What's supposed to happen? Why can't that happen now when they are screwing up basically every single thing they're doing in ways that'd be borderline comical if not for the cost, both dollar and human, that they're inflicting on society?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 21 2019, @05:07PM (9 children)
It did and they did. Not much point to criticizing them for things they did right. And you don't need a million failsafes, you just need one that works.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @07:19PM (8 children)
No, no such thing happened. The whole point of these systems is you don't end up in space without enough fuel to reach your destination - exactly the scenario they are now in. It's only by dumb luck that they have enough fuel to attempt an orbital insertion, which given Boeing's recent track record they'll probably also manage to fuck up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @07:44PM
Actually listening to the NASA press conference now. They screwed up far worse than is even being reported. Just about everything on that craft screwed up. It failed to make a proper satellite link, the engines burnt themselves out in terms of both heat and utilization, and more. Boeing is joke, but the punchline is the taxpayer being forced to waste tens of billions of dollars a year subsidizing this useless company that's clearly simply no longer effective at anything other than buying congressmen.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 22 2019, @02:51PM (6 children)
So what? As I noted before, you wouldn't need these systems in the first place, if the "point" of the systems could be perfectly achieved. And they did end up with enough propellant to reach Earth, the destination that one attempts to reach when one doesn't have enough propellant to reach the original destination of the ISS.
So you claim.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @07:07AM (4 children)
Listen to the press conference. Everything I said, and a whole lot more, was completely affirmed. Facts tend to be more valuable than poorly honed intuition.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 23 2019, @09:50AM (3 children)
So yes, it was a subtle timing issue that caused the mission to fail. And yes, that sort of thing is systemic, which shows that there likely are other such subtle problems that could kill missions and perhaps crew in the future.
But you got it completely wrong. Redundancy (or rather vastly more mission redundancy) is not a panacea for whatever breaks. It adds things that can break as well. And it takes up mass, volume, and mission capabilities. Nor are the presence of the above problems of the press conference an indication that Boeing's effort has somehow gone off the rails. That's the whole point of flying unmanned missions now - to find this stuff and get a working vehicle. Meanwhile, a genuine "million failsafes" means you don't fly, for one reason or another.
Sure, a spacecraft is complex, but it's not that complex. Slapping more redundancy on it isn't a long term solution. Testing it repeatedly so that you can figure out what parts need redundancy and what parts don't is a better approach.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @03:55PM (2 children)
Now you're just babbling because you know you're wrong so the mental gymnastics kicks in to avoid acknowledging that. Keep this up and you'll be voting democrat before you know it.
The Delta IV has a payload capacity on the order of 50,000 pounds depending on the orbit. The Atlas V around 30,000. Redundancies and redundancies for your redundancies have a negligible mass cost - and provide unimaginable value. There's no technical reason they didn't include redundancies. We're not even talking some hugely complex stuff. Boeing is screwing up things as simple as mission timing. Many of these redundancies can be entirely implemented in software and with negligible scale hardware redundancies working as redundancies for your redundancies. The one and only problem here is Boeing. They're an incapable relic of a company that would have crashed and burned long ago if not for their position at the height of crony capitalism, alongside their coasting off inertia and taking credit for what entirely different people under an entirely different company, that happened to share the same name, achieved decades ago.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 24 2019, @01:19AM
Nonsense, particularly when you get to engine systems and life support.
Sorry, I can "imagine" quite well their value. That's why I'm complaining in the first place.
Then they aren't redundancies. No amount of software can replace a bad engine or life support system.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 24 2019, @03:54AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @07:11AM
Also I suspect you're not the sort to actively seek out information on your own here you go:
Main NASA Page [nasa.gov]
Audio of conference [nasa.gov]
Transcript of conference [nasa.gov]
The second to last question is particularly great. It was originally supposed to be the last question but they decided to take one more. Could be a coincidence but it's a question that ended up painting Boeing in an unimaginably negative light, based on their own answers. Great stuff. 'Why were there no redundancies or failsafes?' 'We're not sure. We're looking into that.' Hahaha.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 20 2019, @11:08PM
It doesn't matter if it works, they just declare success and keep going
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday December 20 2019, @11:22PM
>the uncrewed demonstration flight
There is, sometimes, too much innovation. I am referring to languages not space travel. Keeping the latin privative s- prefix would've been so useful in this case: from "uncrewed" to "screwed".
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 20 2019, @11:43PM (5 children)
The capsule is designed for up to 7 folks. The first crewed mission will be 3.
If they had 3 aboard, how long would the consumables last?
Tick Tock, tick tock
Do they think they have the ability to bring them down safely in that time?
Do they have the ground systematic thinking-through-the-problem infrastructure to know this is the allotted time?
The first rule for Apollo 13 was not to make things worse.
"I'll get back to you" or "we are working the problem" can be counterproductive in a time limited situation.
Clearly they need 'nother non-crewed test flight.
But this is an opportunity to see how the ground decision systems work for real stuff where there is not a video game pause button.
Having it happen over the holiday makes it even a better ground test opportunity.
Hopefully NASA gets are useful set of reality check for resume crewed flight from this.
On this Friday before Christmas, it would be interesting to see you much of NASA is on the holiday path versus the bring the sim them home safe path.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 21 2019, @12:07AM (4 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @01:08AM (3 children)
Or O2 before there is enough think time for the ground to make a plan.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 21 2019, @04:02AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @07:08PM (1 child)
Space isn't intuitive. For the obvious stuff: Land on a mountain - crew dies. Land in the middle of the ocean - timely recovery may not be possible. Come in too hot - crew dies. Land in the middle of a city - people die. Land in unfriendly lands - crew may be in danger, recovery difficult.
But even when you get into deorbiting there's a surprisingly large amount of art involved. For instance atmospheric braking can bring you down even if you don't have enough delta v to get the exact insertion you want, but calculating the exact change in speed there - let alone the resultant trajectory is not really possible, so it comes with a substantial risk:reward calculation especially as you start factoring in the above issues.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 22 2019, @03:03PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @01:15AM (2 children)
I wish I was joking, but what I've seen so far goes like this:
When SpaceX has a delay they have to scramble to catch up or risk penalties.
When Boeing has a delay then SpaceX gets held until they catch up.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 21 2019, @01:21AM (1 child)
SpaceX's next Crew Dragon launch is delayed but that's actually good news [teslarati.com]
SpaceX is doing an in-flight abort test, Boeing isn't.
After that, SpaceX could launch astronauts in
FebruaryMarch.[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @01:39AM
That looks like a normal operational delay, so instead of making SpaceX wait they are letting Boeing skip an important test. I hope the astronauts don't wind up paying for that. Thank you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @05:16AM (1 child)
NASA infected everyone on earth with plutonium in 1964:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_for_Nuclear_Auxiliary_Power [wikipedia.org]
We are all mutants.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @12:13PM
Of course the high altitude nuclear weapons testing (that incidentally destroyed an orbiting SNAP-3 powered satellite) wasn't a contributor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime/ [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @07:55AM (4 children)
This is the exact same vessel that also experienced an "anomaly" during their pad abort test [spacenews.com] where only 2 of the 3 parachutes deployed. Boeing, alongside NASA, declared it a success and moved forward to this test - altogether skipping the critical in-flight abort test. And now NASA is suggesting this test may be sufficient for them to go straight to launching humans. And 100% of this nonsense is by fully funded by taxpayer dollars. This is why people, even those fully in support of public space programs, want smaller government. This is so stupidly broken and Boeing, alongside NASA and the taxpayer, are fast-tracking another Challenger disaster. This is corruption that stands to potentially devastate the public space program.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @01:39PM (3 children)
Whoa there, cowboy. I want just a smaller MIC, smaller Boeing included.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @02:50PM (1 child)
Agreed in theory, but in practice are they even separable? The military industrial complex is an endless source of donations, porks, and all the other tools politicians need to help keep themselves in office. And the DNC has effectively turned that party harder and harder towards the MIC. What do you think the gesticulating against Russia is going to lead to? And on the republican side... well it's kind of ironic there was only 11 years between Eisenhower's parting words on the immense risk of the MIC and then Reagan giving Republicans a perma-hardon for it.
Only way I ever see it declining is if we take all of government down quite a few notches.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @08:24PM
Burn DC down and stick 'em like roasted pigs on their way out.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 22 2019, @03:06PM
You just haven't thought about it yet. The US has a smaller MIC than it did in 1970. It just resulted in the power concentrated in fewer hands.